Dustin Bates is out to make Starset a bit of a, er, “Monster” if he can.

The Ohio group/project released its second album, “Vessels,” just over a year ago, debuting in the Top 5 of the several Billboard genre charts -- and No. 11 on the Billboard 200 -- and launching the singles “Monster” and “Satellite.” It came accompanied by a graphic novel, “The Prox Transmissions,” while Starset’s live act features a string section and enough visual stimuli to make sure Starset remains in ascent for the duration of the campaign...

• Bates, who has degrees in electrical engineering and worked for the U.S. Air Force and International Space University, acknowledges by phone that he had sophomore jitters when “Vessels” was released. “It’s a bit of a crap shoot,” he says. “You do what you want to do and hope the fans like it, and you have an idea of the aesthetic that drew them in on the first record. To find out for the most part that the fans really took to the new record, obviously we have a year of data to tell us that they really liked it, which is great.”

• For Starset’s current headlining show, Bates is employing “ideas and elements that we’ve had before and amp them up even further,” including more intense visual projections for the polymer Cube that’s part of the stage set, as well as additional cubes for the group’s string players. “We realized (the show) needed a new geometry so it could be more engaging, more three-dimensional, have more information,” Bates explains. “We redesigned it and now it looks way cooler, and we have a lot of other effects to make sure it’s as immersive as possible.” The repertoire, meanwhile, draws from both Vessels and 2014’s Transformation, including some songs from the former that Bates says “we don’t usually have a chance to play but that seem to be popular with our fan base.”

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• Bates is busy with other projects, including a side group called MNQN and an unnamed progressive rock repertoire, but he also has designs for a third Starset album on the horizon. “I like to do Starset in sort of discreet amounts of time,” he says, “come at it after some time has passed so I can find a new sound and it has a clean break from Vessels and is an entirely new thing, so the records don’t blur from one to the other. I think people understand it’s more like a lab than a band, and I have a lot of musical aspirations and a lot of other things I’d like to do outside of the music. So the long/short story isn’t I haven’t jumped into it yet, but when I do it’ll be full-go.”